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I am trying to see if I should move from my own hardware sitting
in a data center in Milpitas to a VPS. My main criteria is that
I need at least 4 decently fast cores and at least 8G of memory.
I also need about 500G of storage and low ping times from home
in Silicon Valley. I was originally just trying to figure out how
much faster DigitalOcean's optimized droplets were compared to
the standard and posted that to Twitter. Scope creep happened and
I ended up testing 10 different providers.

For the lazy, my verdict for all 10 is right here (with a couple of referral links). For the full details including CPU, disk and network tests along with more detailed observations and screenshots, read on.

The provisioning process is amazing. Fast and responsive. Support is quick and effective.
I was a bit disappointed by the performance of the standard droplets, especially the first one I tested, but the $80 8GB/4 core/50GB SSD optimized droplets absolutely scream only being beat on PHP compile time by a bare metal Vultr box.

A serious competitor to Digital Ocean. I would use this. Especially
if they brought block storage to the west coast. Price and performance
is great and the Web UI for provisioning and managing instances is clear
and easy to use. Even without the block storage, the bare metal instance
with the 2x240 GB SSDs has adequate space. Since it is bare-metal
I assume I would need to mirror the two drives for redundancy so it is still
not close enough to my 500GB target.

Everything just worked and performance was acceptable across the board with
the only exception being block volume reads. I found those to be a bit too
slow. The price/performance ratio is good. At the common $80/month price
point you get 12 GB of ram, 6 cores and 192 GB SSD. If the block volume reads
performance is improved, I could use this.

With the lower-cost HDD block volume storage, GCP is interesting. But I had some performance confusion testing
HDD vs. SDD and for $88 it would be nice to get a larger SSD. On the wrong side of the price/performance ratio for me.

Good price/performance ratio and if they would bring their cheaper class of block volume service to the U.S. this
would be an option for me. As it is right now, I would have to pay $110/month for the extra 500GB of space I need on
top of the $80/month for the VPS and that puts it out of my price range.

Decent performance for a 2-core VPS. I couldn't figure out how to provision a 4-core one. Probably user error on my
part, but I did try for a while. I only have so much patience for large complex Web UIs. Lightsail also didn't have Debian 9
as an option at the time. Debian 8 only. $80/month for a 2 core VPS with average performance is on the expensive end
of the spectrum, so not for me.

Terrible provisioning process. The Web UI is atrocious and some things simply didn't work. When I finally did get my VPS, it worked well though, so that one-time hassle shouldn't discourage you. Since I didn't find a free trial, I tested a cheaper 2-core option with no block storage, but it performed well. If they had a west coast POP it could be an option, but without that it isn't viable for me.

This one was painful. Yes, I have a bit of a Microsoft aversion, but I tried to keep an open mind. Read the full description of my Azure adventure. Expensive, apparently no IPv6, slow disk IO, and I couldn't figure out block storage options. Definitely not for me.

I like Contabo. It took perhaps 20 minutes to get my VPS and there was packet loss on the network, but that was resolved. For $11/month this is an outstanding deal. Being in Europe with no N.American POP I can't use it as my primary VPS, but I will probably keep this one just to have a personal box in Europe to play with.

Like most of my posts here, this is mostly a note to myself so I don't forget how I did it.

I Moved to Debian 9 on my desktop box at home and everything works great except I occasionally use Mega.nz and they don't provide a Debian 9 build. It would be great if they just provided a statically linked generic Linux binary, but they don't. So, to make it work, grab their Debian 8 .deb file.

After nearly 7 years of service I retired my Asus RT-16 router, which wasn't really a router, but a re-purposed wifi access point running AdvancedTomato. In its place I got a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It is Debian-based and has a dual-core 500MHz 64-Bit MIPS CPU (Cavium Octeon+), 512M of ram and a 4G removable onboard USB stick for < $100. The router is completely open and, in fact, any advanced configuration has to be done from the command line. The Web UI has been improving, but there are still many things you can't do in it. In other words, exactly the type of device I prefer.